Why a panoramic tripod head?

So why do you will need a Nodal Ninja or for the matter, any panoramic tripod head?

Many are already taking panoramic photos of anything they like, their homes, places they visit(ed), scenery, anything. Just do a search on Flickr. You’ll see tons of them so why do you need a panoramic head when you are already doing what you are doing?

2 words: Nodal Point.

When you mount your camera on it’s mounting hole onto a tripod head, it’s just rotating around it’s body and not around the nodal point. What is nodal point then?

You have to rotate the camera around the lens instead of the camera. Finding this sweet spot is all you need to take full 360 x 360 panoramas. You just have to do it once.

People tends to be out of time and rush through the readings when coming to the Internet…

Nodal Ninja has a great list of already found nodal point settings for their product. See the list here.

Since it can produce a multi images ones, why not a 360 x 360? As described above, due to the nodal point. However, I have manage to product a flat 360 pano (not a 360 x 360 one) simply by handholding my point and shoot setup equip with a fisheye lens that produces a full circular images like the one shown above. It does however have minor errors too.

The above produced:

A little cropping and producing the final pano is below. Click the image to launch the pano in Flash.

Finally, you can see now I hope that why a panoramic head is essential in producing a good stitch, save time during post production of a 360 x 360 panoramas and allow you more time to enjoy your panos.